Bikeuser shared blog

I said I was over helmet debates but…

If you fix my cycling style, and skills, then some ways you can increase my safety are (1) increasing the population of cyclists (2) reducing the population of motorists (3) reducing the intelligence of other cyclists (4) increasing the intelligence of the motorists.

1 & 3 work because they lead to 4 (or at least increases the alertness/wariness of the motorists).

So to improve my safety, the best thing I can do is encourage bums on bikes, and discourage bums in cars.

If I decide that I can’t do much about everyone else, but I’d like to be a safer cyclist then some things I can do are

(1) avoid getting squished

- make myself more visible:
– cycle in the appropriate bits of the road and don’t lurk in drivers’ blind spots
– wear hi-vis
– have good lights

- make myself more predictable:
– obey the rules of the road
– indicate what I’m about to do, don’t stop suddenly, keep in lane

(2) avoid getting hurt if I am squished

- roll when I fall
- wear a helmet
- …

(3) avoid squishing things

- look out for pedestrians, especially dog walkers. slow down for them. ring my bell. use lights.

What category does:

- don’t wear flares that get caught in the chain and cause me to fall off

come in?

Okay, so let’s start again.

Fix everyone else’s behaviour, and I can improve my safety by dressing appropriately and keeping my bike in order and cycling better. Fix my behaviour and I can improve my safety by getting bums on bikes.

Now, if everyone who’s got on a bike also tries to improve their safety by wearing hi-vis and wearing helmets and keeping in lane, then cars will become less wary, so average safety might actually go down. We’d hope, I think, that that would keep absolutely in line with the numpty-ness, so that the accident rate stays the same.

But - cyclists would then look like a bunch of anoraks, in cycling clips and yellow jackets and helmets and with panniers and lights swinging from their wrists. Which would totally put kids off cycling because it’s “not cool”. So the population of cyclists goes down, reducing my safety.

What nobody really knows is how the numbers balance. And yeah, I didn’t even mention cycle lanes.

I am *so* modelling this for the next stage of my phd.

- helmet debates
- cyclists v cars arguments

things I am not bored of:

- chocolate
- taking pictures of cycle lanes

places I have been

- cambridge (full of tourists who STOP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD HELLO I AM TRYING TO GET PAST *BRINGBRING* gee I might I as well put my bell to permanent ‘on’ but then who would listen to it get me a super loud hooter already)
- lincoln (same as ever it is on a hill)
- france via portsmouth

Portsmouth was like, well, lots of places with cycle networks. It seems the cycle network between, um, fareham and the portsmouth ferry terminal is actually pretty good. But they don’t sign it properly. The A27 wasn’t too bad but it does go up and down a lot. I had to go down that way again recently and it is far, far, less pleasant at 7pm than it was at 10pm. They seem to be building more cycle path on it but the trouble with off-road cycle paths is things like overhanging nettles…

France, France was splendid. Maybe my French google skills are a bit lacking because I can’t find anything on the internet about the beautifully marked cycle routes I followed round Le Havre - mostly on road, but the roads had signs everywhere. Presence de cyclists! Partageons la route! Disembodied bicycles!

A cycle race overtook me. I tried to catch up with it but I was knackered and failed. Boo. I’m thinking of Turbo-charging my bike (so I can get more miles-per-gallon-of-chocolate).

There was a tunnel thing in Le Havre - under part of the town centre. It had a special lane for cyclists so I went in. Whoooosh.

These guys cheated

Summer, people, summer. There’s all this fuel stuff and maybe Britain is getting back its bikes stuff and it’s slow but - my dad has sold one of his cars and is cycling more and maybe in twenty years the roads will look quite different.

I read this in “Around the World on a Penny-Farthing”:

…my bicycle causes the first runaway since the trifling affair at Lembach, Austria. A brown-faced peasant woman and a little girl, driving a small, shaggy pony harnessed to a basket-work, four-wheeled vehicle, are approaching; their humble-looking steed betrays no evidence of restiveness until just as I am turning out to pass him, when, without warning,he gives a swift, sudden bound to the right, nearly upsetting the vehicle, and without more ado bolts odwn a considerable embankment and goes helter-skelter across a field of standing grain.
The old lady pluckily hangs on to the reins, and finally succeeds in bringing the runaway around into the road again without damaging anything save the corn. It might have ended much less satisfactorily, however, and the incident illustrates one possible source of trouble to a ‘cycler travelling alone through countries where the people neither understand, nor can be expected to understand, a wheelman’s position”…

plus ca change…

! Last week to take up the university’s Cycle2Work scheme and buy a nice bike to cycle to work with.

! Bike week 2008 14–21 June, lots of gentle rides to test out your new bike with, or relax post-exams on. See http://www.southampton.gov.uk/leisure/events/home.asp and http://www.southamptoncyclingcampaign.org.uk/events.shtml

! Kick off bike week by joining the colourful cycle cavalcade, taking off from the Bargate at 11am on the 14 June

! Naked bike ride reportage linked here: http://www.southamptoncyclingcampaign.org.uk/media.shtml

! Did you know you can borrow OS maps from the local libraries? Did you know your university card can double as a library card for the local libraries? Take out a map and take off into the New Forest or the rolling Hampshire countryside…

Tonight, 6pm Omdurman Road by the common, bare as you dare.

Tomorrow, ladies’ ride, 10am, somewhere on the common, look for the hats, Five miles to fabulous.

Sunday, daytime, Riverside Park (by the Itchen in Bitterne Park), Springwatch/Breathing spaces festival thing. Bat boxes and green stuff and that.

Your gratuitous rant for the day:

“Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will rape them.”

a) Many women modify their lifes - smoothly, naturally, without thinking about it - based on that fear, a background fear, not a constant panic, rather an awareness.

b) Society and the media propagate that fear. Our local news constantly publishes stories about sex attacks and tries to label places as no-go areas. Sex attacks do happen and are bloody horrible, but the fear and the statistics don’t seem to be in the same place.

c) Same with cycling, actually - many people’s fears of cycling and being hit by cars and things don’t match with statistics.

(d) which is perhaps one of the reasons cycle lanes are useful for getting more people cycling, even if regular cyclists often hate them)

e) and cycling can mitigate the fears of attack (at least compared with walking, but probably not so much as driving)

f) and cycling gets safer if more people are seen on the roads on their bikes, just as “dangerous” no-go areas after dark might be safer if people thronged through them

g) “Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will rape them.” is probably a neat summary of the reactions of the people _not_ going on the naked bike ride. The men say stuff like “Southampton can’t handle my naked body yet”. The women think they’ll be perved over. ( yeah yeah I’m generalising)

h) Gender dynamics exist. Get over it. And that means a mixed ride won’t have the same dynamics as a ladies’ ride. Here, have a tissue.

Oh yeah, cycle2work scheme should be open now. If you’re uni staff, buy a bike! (Details in previous post).